Day 1 - Teaching a child to swim by throwing him in the water

Sometimes the variables are not in your favour...

Our day has gone really well when it comes to the project as a whole. Some of the kinks were worked out a lot quicker than we expected; and building a flow with a random partner was a lot easier than any of us could have fathomed.

However, if you throw a child in water, the first feeling is fear - no doubt. I say this metaphorically. I never learned how to swing, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thrown in the middle of a high risk scenario and have me survive on my own.

Fear is a strong motivator - it drives you to become as close to perfect as one can be.

Okay, enough fluff - details:

We started the day with our morning meetings, which is great in any group. Agile dynamics tend to do this quite a bit. So we were all able to hear about what's going on for the day, plans, and how we have dealt with our parts of the project. The one thing we didn't consider was to glimpse into the future and use that for adjusting plans in the future.

After breakfast, 4 of us went to The University of York where we meet with another linguistics class and we presented our project to them while hearing about their projects. It was amazing to see a few things:
 - Other ideas that are floating in other linguistics communities
 - To see how much we knew, and how much they did
 - To compare the difficulty of assignments between Universities
 - Meet new people

However, my partner and I had our first interview at noon and had to leave before the final presentations. But the variables were not in our favour... My partner was also male, our interviewee was female, which kept some tension for a long period of time; and lulls were especially difficult. Also, we learned not to give your interviewee something to fiddle with (like business cards). I think the gender tension also created short narratives, which is difficult for us because the most casual style of speech is best elicited from narratives. Also, make sure you test all tech out prior to taking it out into the field - I really should have known that.

There were some good points. I felt the best drive for my partner was for him to take lead. I've had a lot of experience with this type of project and these methods (not from work, but from practicing and getting help from people). So I let my partner take over, and he did great! There were lulls - like I said - but it is hard to continually think of questions to ask someone while not taking over as the narrator. Also, the questions need to be engaging and non-offensive. It's hard to think of these questions all the time. What this method did allow was for me to ponder a series of follow up questions for each topic that my partner had hit. Once my partner ran out of questions I was able to ask all the ones I had - the great part was that this then allowed my partner to create his own follow up questions.

Post interview, we were tasked to recruit new people for future interviews. This was easier for my partner than for me. Each person he talked to that met our criteria and was free, booked with him. I was not so lucky. C'est la vie. It was good for him. He went to order a sandwich, and before they were able to make it, he had made one appointment. After the sandwich, and waiting for me to finish, he made another interview! Then he walked into a room of students studying, and got 2 more interviews booked! The man was on fire!

Now I'm in my hotel finishing the last pieces of the day's work. Hopefully things will go well for everyone tomorrow.

Interesting things I've noted here:
On their fire alarm it says, "Fire alarm, call point" - instead of "call police"?
"Your pleasure" instead of "You're welcome"
"Hisself" instead of "himself"

That's it for now!
"There are no permanent changes because change itself is permanent. It behooves the industrialist to research and the investor to be vigilant."
- Ralph L. Woods.